Has anyone listened to The Flop House? It's inferior to HDTGM, but it's apparently the original bad movie podcast, and it's good enough to try.

Elliot Kalan is a strong contender for Most Irritating Voice in Podcasting. You haven't experienced nasally giggles until you've heard his. This is probably the only thing keeping me from binging the show. Nevertheless, I would characterize him as an annoying genius. His non sequiturs can become exhausting, but he goes on these improvised flights of comedic connection that are sometimes mindblowing. Oh and he's the head writer of the Daily Show.

I can't enthusiastically recommend any particular episode, but #169 (live episode on TMNT 2014) is pretty good, and Elliot is markedly more tolerable, as if he's properly modulated by the presence of an audience.

I've continued listening to The Flop House and have grown to appreciate it without reservation. It has all the requisite insight and humor that you need from a bad movie podcast. It helps that I've become desensitized to Elliott Kalan. Once you cross that line, The Flop House is easy to love.

How Did This Get Made is still better, though. And listening to this rival podcast is illustrating why HDTGM is so good.

HDTGM benefits by taking the movies seriously. They take notes and do some preparation. (The Flop House guys don't.) They embrace the absurdity of the exercise and go at it with the full force of their analytical powers. The Flop House is more tangent-focused, and when their interest wanes, they just use the bad movies as an excuse to tell jokes. That works, but it's a less intense and ultimately less fulfilling experience than HDTGM, whose hosts completely bury themselves in the movie. I can't imagine Elliott & co. digging into Sleepaway Camp in the same way, for example. They don't care enough.

HDTGM deconstructs enough that they're able to extract humor from the movie itself; they're less dependent on tangents and silliness and references. They're able to conjure some kind of enthusiasm even for the most boring bad movies; in those cases, Jason's anger somehow keeps things afloat. When HDTGM watches a bad bad movie, the result is exhaustion, which can be entertaining. When The Flop House watches a bad bad movie, they can get a little depressed, which is less enjoyable. It probably helps that the HDTGM hosts are all experienced actors and know how to keep things fun.

The Flop House guys for some reason limit their selection to recent releases. There is no good reason for that; all it means is that they have a somewhat poor track record of finding good bad movies. HDTGM for example just did Zardoz. I would love to hear a Flop House podcast on that.

Speaking of spoof shows featuring Paul Scheer and June Diane Raphael to varying degrees, I just binged Burning Love and The Hotwives of Orlando/Las Vegas over the past couple weeks. Both highly recommendable. I imagine if you have a base familiarity with the properties being parodied (The Bachelor/Bachelorette and the Real Housewives shows), they probably hit some notes that you wouldn't hear otherwise, but even if, like me, you're only vaguely aware of those things as cultural references, the shows still stand alone as pure quality comedy.

Burning Love is amazing. (Thread here, with defunct links.) Where did you watch it? Cause it looks like it's only available behind the Hulu paywall.

I also had no familiarity with The Bachelor/Bachelorette, and it also worked for me just the same. After listening to this and watching some of UnREAL, I started having flashbacks to Burning Love and recalling jokes from that show, which are suddenly funnier and sharper.

As I said in that thread, Burning Love has some legitimately transcendent moments, many involving June or Michael Ian Black, who seems to have been made for this role.